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Overview

Last updated on 2017-10-12 14:58:08

Barracuda Active DDoS Prevention is a service that protects you against volumetric DDoS attacks. Combined with the Application DDoS protection features of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, Barracuda Active DDoS Protection gives you comprehensive protection from all types of DDoS attacks.

What is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)?

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become a tool of choice for malicious organizations worldwide. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are different from Denial of Service attacks.

A Denial of Service (DoS)attack is a cyberattack in which an attacker makes a web application unavailable to its intended users – effectively denying service to them. Denial of Service attacks are typically accomplished by flooding the target application with fake traffic or requests, in an attempt to overload systems and prevent legitimate traffic from reaching the application server.

In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the attacker uses many different sources for the fake traffic – typically tens or hundreds of thousands. This makes it difficult to stop the attack by identifying and blocking a list of sources. A DDoS attack can be likened to sending a crowd of people to a retail store, who stand and block the entryway, preventing legitimate customers from entering.

Application vs. Volumetric DDoS Attacks

An ApplicationDDoS attack is a sophisticated strike in which an attacker takes advantage of a known performance problem in your application to overload it. For example, an attacker might find a function of the application that performs a performance-heavy query (like a full text search), and repeatedly trigger that function, thereby overloading the database.

Application DDoS attacks target your application server.

A VolumetricDDoS attack is a less sophisticated attack, in which an attacker floods your application server with a large amount of fake traffic. The server immediately rejects the traffic; but with a sufficiently large amount of traffic, the time it takes to merely inspect and reject the traffic is enough to overload the application server, making it unable to serve legitimate requests.

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall – like other firewalls – cannot protect your network from large volumetric DDoS attacks, because the attack is likely to overwhelm your network infrastructure before it even reaches your Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Large volumetric DDoS attacks can bombard your routers, firewalls, and switches with loads in excess of 50 gigabits per second – a tremendous load most internet links cannot handle. It is essential to have a dedicated infrastructure to receive and filter huge amounts of traffic to mitigate large volumetric DDoS attacks. Barracuda DDoS Prevention Service works with the Barracuda Web Application Firewall to provide the infrastructure to protect your system from large volumetric DDoS attacks.